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Scientists have found that although we are prone to snap overreactions, if we take a moment and think about how we are likely to react, we can reduce or even eliminate the negative effects of our quick,hard-wired responses.Snap decisions can be important defense mechanisms; if we are judging whether someone is dangerous, our brains and bodies are hard-wired to react very quickly,within milliseconds. But we need more time to assess other factors. To accurately tell whether someone is sociable, studies show, we need at least a minute, preferably five. It takes a while to judge complex aspects of personality, like neuroticism or open-mindedness.But snap decisions in reaction to rapid stimuli aren’t exclusive to the interpersonal realm. Psychologists at the University of Toronto found that viewing a fast-food logo for just a few milliseconds primes us to read 20 percent faster, even though reading has little to do with eating. We unconsciously associate fast food with speed and impatience and carry those impulses into whatever else we’re doing. Subjects exposed to fast-food flashes also tend to think a musical piece lasts too long.Yet we can reverse such influences. If we know we will overreact to consumer products or housing options when we see a happy face ( one reason good sales representatives and real estate agents are always smiling),we can take a moment before buying. If we know female job screeners are more likely to reject attractive female ap-plicants ,we can help screeners understand their biases—or hire outside screeners.John Gottman, the marriage expert, explains that we quickly “thin slice” information reliably only after we ground such snap reactions in “thick sliced” long-term study. When Dr. Gottman really wants to assess whether a couple will stay together, he invites them to his island retreat for a much longer evaluation: two days, not two seconds.Our ability to mute our hard-wired reactions by pausing is what differentiates us from animals: dogs can think about the future only intermittently or for a few minutes. But historically we have spent about 12 percent of our days contemplating the longer term. Although technology might change the way we react, it hasn’t changed our nature. We still have the imaginative capacity to rise above temptation and reverse the high-speed trend.1.The time needed in making decisions may(  ).2.Our reaction to a fast-food logo shows that snap decisions (  ).  3.To reverse the negative influences of snap decisions, we should  (  ).  4.John Gottman says that reliable snap reactions are based on  (  ).  5.The author’s attitude toward reversing the high-speed trend is(  ).

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Convenience food helps companies by creating growth, but what is its effect on people? For people who think cooking was the foundation of civilization, the microwave is the last enemy. The communion of eating togetheris easily broken by a device that liberates households citizens from waiting for mealtimes. The first great revolution in the history of food is in danger of being undone. The companionship of the campfire, cooking pot and common table, which have helped to bond humans in collaborative living for at least 150000 years could be destroyed.Meals have certainly sated from the rise of convenience food. The only meals regularly taken together in Britain these days are at the weekend, among rich families struggling to retain something of the old symbol of togetherness. Indeed, the day’s first meal has all but disappeared. In the 20th century the leisure British breakfast was undermined by the corn flake; in the 21st breakfast is vanishing altogether a victim of the quick cup of coffee in Starbucks and the cereal bar.Convenience food has also made people forget how to cook one of the apparent paradoxes of modern food is that while the amount of time spent cooking meals has fallen from 60 minutes a day in 1980 to 13M a day in 2002, the number of cooks and television programmer on cooking has multiplied. But perhaps this isn’t a paradox. Maybe it is became people can’t cook anymore, so they need to be told how to do it, or maybe it is because people buy books about hobbies—golf, yachting—not about chores. Cooking has ceased to be a chore and has become a hobby.Although everybody lives in the kitchen. its facilities are increasingly for display rather than for use. Mr. Silverstein’s now book, “trading up” look at mid-range consumer’s milling now to splash out. He says that industrial—style Viking cook pot, with nearly twice the heat output of other ranges, have helped to push the “kitchen as theater” trend in hour goods. They cost from $1000 to $9000.Some 75% of them are never used.Convenience also has an impact on the healthiness, or otherwise, of food, of course there is nothing bad about ready to eat food itself. You don’t get much healthier than an apple, and supermarkets sell a better for you range of ready-meals. But there is a limit to the number of apples people want to eat; and these days it is easier for people to eat the kind of food that makes them fat. The three Harvard economists in their paper “why have Americans become more obese?” point out that in the past, if people wanted to eat fatty hot food, they had to cook it. That took time and energy a good chip needs frying twice, once to cook the potato and once to get it crispy. Which discouraged of consumption of that cost of food. Mass preparation of food took away that constraint. Nobody has to cut and double cook their own fries these days. Who has the time?1.What might the previous paragraphs deal with? 2.What is the paradox in the third paragraph?3.What does the passage mainly discuss?4.Why has American become more obese?5.Which of the following might the another mostly agree with?

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Being a good parent is, of course, what every parent would like to be. But defining what it means to be a good parent is undoubtedly very _1_, particularly since children respond differently to the same style of parenting. A calm, rule-following child might respond better to a different sort of parenting than, _2_, a younger sibling._3_, there’s another sort of parent that’s a bit easier to _4_: a patient parent. Children of every age benefit from patient parenting. Still, _5_ every parent would like to be patient, this is no easy _6_. Sometimes parents get exhausted and frustrated and are unable to maintain a _7_ and composed style with their kids. I understand this.You’re only human, and sometimes your kids can _8_ you just a little too far. And then the _9_ happens: You lose your patience and either scream at your kids or say something that was a bit too _10_ and does nobody any good. You wish that you could _11_ the clock and start over. We’ve all been there._12_, even though it’s common, it’s important to keep in mind that in a single moment of fatigue, you can say something to your child that you may _13_ for a long time. This may not only do damage to your relationship with your child but also _14_ your child’s self-esteem.If you consistently lose your _15_ with your kids, then you are inadvertently modeling a lack of emotional control for your kids. We are all becoming increasingly aware of the _16_ of modeling tolerance and patience for the younger generation. This is a skill that will help them all throughout life. In fact, the ability to emotionally regulate or maintain emotional control when _17_ by stress is one of the most important of all life’s skills.Certainly, it’s incredibly _18_ to maintain patience at all times with your children. A more practical goal is to try, to the best of your ability, to be as tolerant and composed as you can when faced with _19_ situations involving your children. I can promise you this: As a result of working toward this goal, you and your children will benefit and _20_ from stressful moments feeling better physically and emotionally.

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Rats and other animals need to be highly attuned to social signals from others so they can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings, Loleh Quinn at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals from robotic rats.They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat — one social and one asocial — for four days.The robots rats were quite minimalist, resembling a chunkier version of a computer mouse with wheels to move around and colorful markings.During the experiment, the social robot rat followed the living rats around, played with the same toys, and opened caged doors to let trapped rats escape. Meanwhile, the asocial robot simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side.Next, the researchers trapped the robots in cages and gave the rats the opportunity to release them by pressing a lever.Across 18 trials each, the living rats were 52 percent more likely on average to set the social robot free than the asocial one. This suggests that the rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being. They may have bonded more with the social robot because it displayed behaviors like communal exploring and playing. This could lead to the rats better remembering having freed it earlier, and wanting the robot to return the favour when they get trapped, says Quinn.The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its minimal design. The robot was the same size as a regular rat but resembled a simple plastic box on wheels. “We’d assumed we’d have to give its moving head and tail, facial features, and put a scene on it to make it smell like a real rat, but that wasn’t necessary,” says Janet Wiles at the University of Queensland in Australia, who helped with the research.The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social cues, even when they come from basic robots. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display only simple social signals. “We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and it turns out other animals are too,” says Wiles.(1)Quinn and her colleagues conducted a test to see if rats can (  ).(2)What did the asocial robot do during the experiment?(3)According to Quinn, the rats released the social robot because they (  ).(4)James Wiles notes that rats(  ).(5)It can be learned from the text that rats(  ).

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It is true that CEO pay has gone up — top ones may make 300 times the pay of typical workers on average, and since the mid-1970s CEO pay for large publicly traded American corporations has, by varying estimates, gone up by about 500%. The typical CEO of a top American corporation —from the 350 largest such companies — now makes about $18.9 million a year.The best model for understanding the growth of CEO pay is that of limited CEO talent in a world where business opportunities for the top firms are growing rapidly. The efforts of America’s highest-earning 1% have been one of the more dynamic elements of the global economy. It’s not popular to say, but one reason their pay has gone up so much is that CEOs really have upped their game relative to many other workers in the U.S. economy.Today’s CEO, at least for major American firms, must have many mere skills than simply being able to “run the company”. CEOs must have a good sense of financial markets and maybe even how the company should trade in them. They also need better public relations skills than their predecessors, as the costs of even a minor slipup can be significant. Then there’s the fact that large American companies are much more globalized than ever before, with supply chains spread across a larger number of countries. To lead in that system requires knowledge that is fairly mind-boggling plus, virtually all major American companies are beyond this major CEOs still have to do all the day-to-day work they have always done. The common idea that high CEO pay is mainly about ripping people off doesn’t explain history very well. By most measures, corporate governance has become a lot tighter and more rigorous since the 1970s. Yet it is principally during this period of stronger governance that CEO pay has been high and rising. That suggests it is in the broader corporate interest to recruit top candidates for increasingly tough jobs.Furthermore, the highest CEO salaries are paid to outside candidates, not to the cozy insider picks, another sign that high CEO pay is not some kind of depredation at the expense of the rest of the company. And the stock market reacts positively when companies tie CEO pay to, say, stock prices, a sign that those practices build up corporate value not just for the CEO.(1)Which of the following has contributed to CEO pay rise?(2)Compared with their predecessors, today’s CEOs are required to(  ) .(3)CEO pay has been rising since the 1970s despite(  ).(4)High CEO pay can be justified by the fact that it helps(  ).(5)The most suitable title for this text would be(  ).

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Madrid was hailed as a public health beacon last November when it rolled out ambitious restrictions on the most polluting cars. Seven months and one election day later, a new conservative city council suspended enforcement of the clean air zone, a first step toward its possible demise.Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida made opposition to the zone a centerpiece of his election campaign, despite its success in improving air quality. A judge has now overruled the city’s decision to stop levying fines, ordering them reinstated. But with legal battles ahead, the zone’s future looks uncertain at best.Among other weaknesses, the measures cities must employ when left to tackle dirty air on their own are politically contentious, and therefore vulnerable. That’s because they inevitably put the costs of cleaning the air on to individual drivers — who must pay fees or buy better vehicles — rather than on to the car manufacturers whose cheating is the real cause of our toxic pollution.It’s not hard to imagine a similar reversal happening in London. The new ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) is likely to be a big issue in next year’s mayoral election. And if Sadiq Khan wins and extends it to the North and South Circular roads in 2021 as he intends, it is sure to spark intense opposition from the far larger number of motorists who will then be affected.It’s not that measures such as London’s Ulez are useless. Far from it. Local officials are using the levers that are available to them to safeguard residents’ health in the face of a serious threat. The zones do deliver some improvements to air quality, and the science tells us that means real health benefits — fewer heart attacks, strokes and premature births, less cancer, dementia and asthma. Fewer untimely deaths.But mayors and councilors can only do so much about a problem that is far bigger than any one city or town. They are acting because national governments — Britain’s and others across Europe — have failed to do so.Restrictions that keep highly polluting cars out of certain areas — city centres, “school streets”, even individual roads — are a response to the absence of a larger effort to properly enforce existing regulations and require auto companies to bring their vehicles into compliance. Wales has introduced special low speed limits to minimize pollution. We’re doing everything but insist that manufacturers clean up their cars.(1)Which of the following is true about Madrid’s clean air zone?(2) Which is considered a weakness of the city-level measures to tackle dirty air?(3)The author believes that the extension of London’s Ulez will(  ).(4)Who does the author think should have addressed the problem?(5)It can be inferred from the last paragraph that auto companies .

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Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring — the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year — the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. GenZs are about to hit the streets looking for work in a labor market that’s tighter than it’s been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates for jobs in the U S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them.If “entitled” is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to millennials (those born between 1981 and1995), the catchwords for Generation Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, Gen Zs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both. They aren’t interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College loan balances in the U.S. now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment (followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was the second most important career goal (work-life balance was number one), followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good. That's a big change from the previous generation. “Millennials wanted more flexibility in their lives,” notes Tanya Michelsen, Associate Director of YouthSight, a UK-based brand manager that conducts regular 60-day surveys of British youth, in findings that might just as well apply to American youth. “Generation Z are looking for more certainty and stability, because of the rise of the gig economy. They have trouble seeing a financial future and they are quite risk averse.”(1)Generation Zs graduating college this spring(  ).(2)Generation Zs are keenly aware(  ).(3)The word “assuage” (line 9, para 2) is closet in meaning to(  ).(4)It can be learned from Paragraph 3 that Generation Zs(  ).(5)Michelsen thinks that compared with millennials, Generation Zs are(  ).

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Five Ways to Win Over Everyone in the OfficeIs it possible to like everyone in your office? Think about how tough it is to get together 15 people, much less 50, who all get along perfectly. But unlike in friendships, you need coworkers. You work with them every day and you depend on them just as they depend on you. Here are some ways that you can get the whole office on your side(1)____If you have a bone to pick with someone in your workplace, you may try stay tight-lipped around them. But you won’t be helping either one of you. A Harvard Business School study found that observers consistently rated those who were frank about themselves more highly, while those who hid lost trustworthiness. The lesson is not that you should make your personal life an open book, but rather, when given the option to offer up details about yourself or painstakingly conceal them, you should just be honest.(2)_____Just as important as being honest about yourself is being receptive to others. We often feel the need to tell others how we feel, whether it’s a concern about a project, a stray thought, or a compliment. Those are all valid, but you need to take time to hear out your coworkers, too. In fact, rushing to get your own ideas out there can cause colleagues to feel you don’t value their opinions. Do your best to engage coworkers in a genuine, back- and-forth conversation, rather than prioritizing your own thoughts.(3)_____It’s common to have a “cubicle mate” or special confidant in a work setting. But in addition to those trusted coworkers, you should expand your horizons and find out about all the people around you. Use your lunch and coffee breaks to meet up with colleagues you don’t always see. Find out about their lives and interests beyond the job. It requires minimal effort and goes a long way. This will help to grow your internal network, in addition to being a nice break in the work day.(4)_____Positive feedback is important for anyone to hear. And you don’t have to be someone’s boss to tell them they did an exceptional job on a particular project. This will help engender good will in others. But don’t overdo it or be fake about it. One study found that people responded best to comments that shifted from negative to positive, possibly because it suggested they had won somebody over.(5)______This one may be a bit more difficult to pull off, but it can go a long way to achieving results. Remember in dealing with any coworker what they appreciate from an interaction. Watch out for how they verbalize with others. Some people like small talk in a meeting before digging into important matters, while other are more straightforward. Jokes that work one person won’t necessarily land with another. So, adapt your style accordingly to type. Consider the person that you’re dealing with in advance and what will get you to your desired outcome.

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Thinner isn’t always better. A number of studies have 1 that normal-weight people are in fact at higher risk of some diseases compared to those who are overweight. And there are health conditions for which being over-weight is actually 2 . For example, heavier women are less likely to develop calcium deficiency than thin women. 3 , among the elderly, being somewhat overweight is often an 4 of good health.Of even greater 5 is the fact that obesity turns out to be very difficult to define. It is often defined 6 body mass index, or BMI. BMI 7 body mass divided by the square of height. An adult with a BMI of 18 to 25 is often considered to be normal weight. Between 25 and 30 is overweight. And over 30 is considered obese. Obesity, 8 , can be divided into moderately obese, severely obese, and very severely obese.While such numerical standards seem 9 , they are not. Obesity is probably less a matter of weight than body fat. Some people with a high BMI are in fact extremely fit, 10 others with a low BMI may be in poor 11 For example, many collegiate and professional football players 12 as obese, though their percentage body fat is low. Conversely, someone with a small frame may have high body fat but a 13 BMI.Today we have a (an) 14 to label obesity as a disgrace. The overweight are sometimes 15 in the media with their faces covered. Stereotypes 16 with obesity include laziness, lack of will power, and lower prospects for success. Teachers, employers, and health professionals have been shown to harbor biases against the obese. 17 very young children tend to look down on the overweight, and teasing about body build has long been a problem in schools.Negative attitudes toward obesity, 18 in health concerns, have stimulated a number of anti-obesity 19 . My own hospital system has banned sugary drinks from its facilities. Many employers have instituted weight loss and fitness initiatives. Michelle Obama has launched a high-visibility campaign 20 childhood obesity, even claiming that it represents our greatest national security threat.

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What would you do with $590m? This is now a question for Gloria Mackenzie, an 84-year-old widow who recently emerged from her small, tin-roofed house in Florida to collect the biggest undivided lottery jackpot in history. If she hopes her new-found fortune will yield lasting feelings of fulfillment, she could do worse than read Happy Money by Elizabeth Dumn and Michael Norton.These two academics use an array of behavioral research to show that the most rewarding ways to spend money can be counterintuitive. Fantasies of great wealth often involve visions of fancy cars and extravagant homes. Yet satisfaction with these material purchases wears off fairly quickly. What was once exciting and new becomes old-hat; regret creeps in. It is far better to spend money on experiences, say Ms. Dunn and Mr. Norton, like interesting trips, unique meals or even going to the cinema. These purchases often become more valuable with time—as stories or memories—particularly if they involve feeling more connected to others.This slim volume is packed with tips to help wage slaves as well as lottery winners get the most “happiness bang for your buck. ” It seems most people would be better off if they could shorten their commutes to work, spend more time with friends and family and less of it watching television ( something the average American spends a whopping two months a year doing, and is hardly jollier for it). Buying gifts or giving to charity is often more pleasurable than purchasing things for oneself, and luxuries are most enjoyable when they are consumed sparingly. This is apparently the reason McDonald’s restricts the availability of its popular McRib---a marketing trick that has turned the pork sandwich into an object of obsession.Readers of Happy Money are clearly a privileged lot,anxious about fulfillment, not hunger. Money may not quite buy happiness, but people in wealthier countries are generally happier than those in poor ones. Yet the link between feeling good and spending money on others can be seen among rich and poor people around the world, and scarcity enhances the pleasure of most things for most people. Not everyone will agree with the authors’ policy ideas, which range from mandating more holiday time to reducing tax incentives for American homebuyers. But most people will come away from this book believing it was money well spent.1.According to Dumn and Norton, which of the following is the most rewarding purchase?2.The author’s attitude toward Americans’ watching TV is (  ).3.McRib is mentioned in paragraph 3 to show that (  ).  4.According to the last paragraph, Happy Money (  ).  5.This text mainly discusses how to(  ).

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An article in Scientific America has pointed out that empirical research says that, actually, you think you’re more beautiful than you are. We have a deep-seated need to feel good about ourselves and we naturally employ a number of self-enhancing strategies to achieve this. Social psychologists have amassed oceans of research into what they call the “above average effect”,or “illusory superiority”,and shown that, for example, 70% of us rate ourselves as above average in leadership, 93% in driving and 85% at getting on well with others—all obviously statistical impossibilities.We rose-tint our memories and put ourselves into self-affirming situations. We become defensive when criti-cized, and apply negative stereotypes to others to boost our own esteem. We stalk around thinking we’re hot stuff.Psychologist and behavioural scientist Nicholas Epley oversaw a key study into self-enhancement and attrac-tiveness. Rather than have people simply rate their beauty compared with others, he asked them to identify an original photograph of themselves from a lineup including versions that had been altered to appear more and less attractive. Visual recognition, reads the study, is “an automatic psychological process, occurring rapidly and intuitively with little or no apparent conscious deliberation”. If the subjects quickly chose a falsely flattering image—which most did—they genuinely believed it was really how they looked.Epley found no significant gender difference in responses. Nor was there any evidence that those who self-en-hanced the most (that is, the participants who thought the most positively doctored pictures were real) were doing so to make up for profound insecurities. In fact, those who thought that the images higher up the attractiveness scale were real directly corresponded with those who showed other markers for having higher self-esteem. “I don’t think the findings that we have are any evidence of personal delusion”, says Epley. “It’s a reflection simply of people generally thinking well of themselves." If you are depressed, you won’t be self-enhancing.Knowing the results of Epley’s study, it makes sense that many people hate photographs of themselves vis- cerally—on one level, they don’t even recognize the person in the picture as themselves. Facebook, therefore, is a self-enhancer’s paradise, where people can share only the most flattering photos, the cream of their wit, style, beauty, intellect and lifestyles. “It’s not that people’s profiles are dishonest”, says Catalina Toma of Wisconsin-Madison University, “but they portray an idealized version of themselves."1.According to the first paragraph, social psychologists have found that (  ).2.Visual recognition is believed to be people’s (  ).  3.Epley found that people with higher self-esteem tended to (  ).  4.The word “viscerally” ( Para. 5) is closest in meaning to (  ).  5.It can be inferred that Facebook is a self-enhancer’s paradise because people can(  ).

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The concept of man versus machine is at least as old as the industrial revolution, but this phenomenon tends to be most acutely felt during economic downturns and fragile recoveries. And yet, it would be a mistake to think we are right now simply experiencing the painful side of a boom and bust cycle. Certain jobs have gone away for good, outmoded by machines. Since technology has such an insatiable appetite for eating up human jobs, this phenomenon will continue to restructure our economy in ways we can’t immediately foresee.When there is rapid improvement in the price and performance of technology, jobs that were once thought to be immune from automation suddenly become threatened. This argument has attracted a lot of attention, via the success of the book Race Against the Machine, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who both hail from MIT’s Center for Digital Business.This is a powerful argument, and a scary one. And yet, John Hagel, author of The Power of Pull and other books,says Brynjolfsson and McAfee miss the reason why these jobs are so vulnerable to technology in the first place.Hagel says we have designed jobs in the U. S. that tend to be “tightly scripted” and “highly standardized” ones that leave no room for individual initiative or creativity. "In short, these are the types of jobs that machines can perform much better at than human beings. That is how we have put a giant target sign on the backs of American workers," Hagel says.It’s time to reinvent the formula for how work is conducted, since we are still relying on a very 20th century notion of work, Hagel says. In our rapidly changing economy, we more than ever need people in the workplace who can take initiative and exercise their imagination “to respond to unexpected events. That’s not something machines are good at. They are designed to perform very predictable activities.As Hagel notes, Brynjolfsson and McAfee indeed touched on this point in their book. We need to reframe race against the machine as race with the machine. In other works, we need to look at the ways in which machines can augment human labor rather than replace it. So then the problem is not really about technology, but rather, “how do we innovate our institutions and our work practices?”1.According to the first paragraph, economic downturns would(  ).2.The authors of Race Against the Machine argue that (  ).  3.Hagel argues that jobs in the U. S. are often (  ).  4.According to the last paragraph, Brynjolfsson and McAfee discussed (  ).  5.Which of the following could be the most appropriate title for the text?

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When the government talks about infrastructure contributing to the economy the focus is usually on roads, railways, broadband and energy. Housing is seldom mentioned.Why is that? To some extent the housing sector must shoulder the blame. We have not been good at commu-nicating the real value that housing can contribute to economic growth. Then there is the scale of the typical housing project It is hard to shove for attention among multibillion-pound infrastructure projects, so it is inevitable that the attention is focused elsewhere. But perhaps the most significant reason is that the issue has always been so politically charged.Nevertheless, the affordable housing situation is desperate. Waiting lists increase all the time and we are simply not building enough new homes.The comprehensive spending review offers an opportunity for the government to help rectify this. It needs to put historical prejudices to one side and take some steps to address our urgent housing need.There are some indications that it is preparing to do just that. The communities minister, Don Foster, has hinted that George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, may introduce more flexibility to the current cap on the amount that local authorities can borrow against their housing stock debt. Evidence shows that 60, 000 extra new homes could be built over the next five years if the cap were lifted, increasing GDP by 0.6%.Ministers should also look at creating greater certainty in the rental environment, which would have a significant impact on the ability of registered providers to fund new developments from revenues.But it is not just down to the government. While these measures would be welcome in the short term, we must face up to the fact that the existing £4.5 bn programme of grants to fund new affordable housing, set to expire in 2015, is unlikely to be extended beyond then. The Labour party has recently announced that it will retain a large part of the coalition’s spending plans if it returns to power. The housing sector needs to accept that we are very unlikely to ever return to the era of large-scale public grants. We need to adjust to this changing climate.While the government’s commitment to long-term funding may have changed, the very pressing need for more affordable housing is real and is not going away.1.The author believes that the housing sector(  ) .2.It can be learned that affordable housing has (  ) .  3.According to Paragraph 5, George Osborne may  (  ) .  4.It can be inferred that a stable rental environment would (  ) .  5.The author believes that after 2015, the government may(  ) .

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Emerging in the late Sixties and reaching a peak in the Seventies, Land Art was one of a range of new forms, including Body Art, Performance Art, Action Art and Installation Art, which pushed art beyond the traditional confines of the studio and gallery. Rather than portraying landscape, land artists used the physical substance of the land itself as their medium.The British land art, typified by Richard Long’s piece, was not only more domestically scaled, but a lot quirkier than its American counterpart. Indeed, while you might assume that an exhibition of Land Art would consist only of records of works rather than the works themselves, Long’s photograph of his work is the work. Since his “action” is in the past, the photograph is its sole embodiment.That might seem rather an obscure point, but it sets the tone for an exhibition that contains a lot of black- and-white photographs and relatively few natural objects.Long is Britain’s best-known Land Artist and his Stone Circle, a perfect ring of purplish rocks from Portis- head beach laid out on the gallery floor, represents the elegant, rarefied side of the form. The Boyle Family, on the other hand, stands for its dirty, urban aspect. Comprising artists Mark Boyle and Joan Hills and their children, they recreated random sections of the British landscape on gallery walls. Their Olaf Street Study, a square of brick-strewn waste ground, is one of the few works here to embrace the commonplaceness that characterises most of our experience of the landscape most of the time.Parks feature, particularly in the earlier works, such as John Hilliard’s very funny Across the Park, in which a long-haired stroller is variously smiled at by a pretty girl arid unwittingly assaulted in a sequence of images that turn out to be different parts of the same photograph.Generally however British land artists preferred to get away from towns, gravitating towards landscapes that are traditionally considered beautiful such as the Lake District or the Wiltshire Downs. While it probably wasn’t apparent at the time, much of this work is permeated by a spirit of romantic escapism that the likes of Wordsworth would have readily understood. Derek Jarman’s yellow-tinted film Towards Avebury, a collection of long, mostly still shots of the Wiltshire landscape, evokes a tradition of English landscape painting stretching fromSamuel Palmer to Paul Nash.In the case of Hamish Fulton, you can’t help feeling that the Scottish artist has simply found a way of making his love of walking pay. A typical work, such as Seven Days, consists of a single beautiful black-and-white photograph taken on an epic walk, with the mileage and number of days taken listed beneath. British Land Art as shown in this well selected, but relatively modestly scaled exhibition wasn’t about imposing on the landscape, more a kind of landscape-orientated light conceptual art created passing through. It had its origins in the great outdoors, but the results were as gallery-bound as the paintings of Turner and Constable.1.Stone Circle (  )2.Olaf Street Study (  )  3.Across the Park (  )  4.Towards Avebury (  )  5.Seven Days (  )

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